On the eve of the Queensland flood 1 year memorial it is fitting to blog about The Pineapple Lounge. The unveiling at Woodford was acclaimed in 2010 and the flood aid concert in 2011 a hit! A combination of great music, graphics, and Champine!

As a fan of the pineapple as a fruit and the motif,

I really wanted to experience ’The Pineapple Lounge‘ after reading this description…

Thehome of Champine and Woodfordia’s upright piano,

the Pineapple Lounge provides the ambience and warmth of a welcoming domestic loungeroom

as well as a funky little refreshment bar serving a highly gluggable drink made with fresh pineapple.

… and to keep me tantalised, We did a lot of things to make the woodford venue unique ….This included designing and building a 3 meter high fan to cool the venue and the dance floor (made specifically for the venue by one of the designers from the film Mad Max), powered by a dragster bicycle, which punters at the venue pedalled for a free ‘CHAMPINE’, our trademark pineapple drink, ….. also designed and built a 5 meter pineapple out of coconuts and bamboo, based on a geodesic dome design. and some more Pineapple Hype…

browndog is a film company based in Paddington Brisbane. www.browndog.com.au. Well known for hosting great parties over the years, The Woodford Folk Festival invited them to create a bar at their festival in 2010, which they named ‘The Pineapple Lounge’. It was a stellar success and despite unusual unrelenting rains, they had a stellar line-up of bands playing there as well as making the space a haven for festival goers and pretty much achieved their aim of creating one of the best festival bars ever in Australia. It was so successful, ABC did a National 3 hour broadcast from there on New Years Eve, which rated very highly. A constant flow of their trademark cocktail champine to the ABC crew, helped them get mentioned at least 10,000 times in the 3 hours…..

The Pineapple Lounge kept the champine flowing at their FLOOD AID East Coast Tour which happened firstly in Brisbane ( the biggest of them all with 450 attending and 13 acts on the bill), then Sydney and Melbourne early in 2011 and raised nearly $10,000 for the Red Cross Major Disaster Relief Appeal. We had great support from bands, donors, venues, production and attendees and it was a great thing to activate and be a part of. So much goodwill was in the air.

I am an Apple girl! I’m feeling sad at the untimely passing of Steve Jobs,

a guy that literally changed the world! I honour his legacy.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Jobs’ story is the ultimate underdog story… Here’s a guy who was adopted out by his biological parents, started his career based on his interests and literally took over the world. According to Wikipedia,“Jobs is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 338 US patents or patent applications related to a range of technologies from actual computer, ransomware analysis and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages.”

Watch Jobs’ amazing speech to a group of Stanford University students in 2005.

It’s tough to think of someone who has so dramatically changed our lives for the better… here is the man behind the Apple conglomerate, a company that has evolved and grown to be the most powerful company in the USA. The company that brought us the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad…

Thankfully, Jobs didn’t just stick to computers per se… In 1986, he bought Pixar and worked with Disney to turn the animated film genre on its head… Over the years, this company has given Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles to the world.

Jobs’ legacy will live on… for every iPod, iPad, iPhone , iEverything in the world, there is the memory of Steve Jobs… the coolest nerd to ever grace our planet.

the assemblage of decor and fashion images is an ode to feminine, French, and, yes, glamorous style.”

–Rebecca Robertson, Deputy Decorating Editor, Martha Stewart

{welcome to this is glamorous}

a celebration of design in all its forms: what began as a place to catalog beautiful things has transformed into an international place of inspiration, capturing the imaginations of thousands of daily readers from around the world . .
this award-winning design & lifestyle blog explores an enchanting array of topics including design, interiors, travel, fashion, art, photography, adventures in love and the daily search for beautiful things

{this is glamorous} been featured on many blogs, websites, newspapers and magazines including martha stewart, the washington post, design*sponge, decor8, apartment therapy, glamour and many other wonderful design and fashion websites, and was featured in the may 2010 issue of lucky magazine

History is fine, Weir says, but it doesn’t pay the bills. It was she who insisted when she joined her mother in the business 30 years ago that customers pay for the clothes before they took them home. Luxury Lil’s approach was to send out the occasional bill. Now, only the oldest customers take merchandise home without handing over the folding stuff.

Le Louvre, the grande dame of fashion on Collins Street has moved after 80 years and been reinvented in a historic and heritage protected red-brick 1920s former tramways building. You’ll find it at a nondescript side street in the former industrial precinct of South Yarra.

“My mother had a thing about gilding everything she could get her mitts on,” Weir says. “I’m more about silver and taxidermy.” The beak and wings of a stuffed albatross will be used to display pieces by Los Angeles-based jeweller Tom Binns, and Weir is searching for a monkey skeleton and a taxidermic chicken to add a certain something to the shop’s metallic silver, pink and white interiors.

The flowing copperplate Le Louvre logo designed by artist Louis Kahn for the facade of Collins Street in the 1950s will be reinterpreted as a hot-pink neon sign outside the new building in Daly Street. The Le Louvre logo also will appear inside the store as scrawls created by graffiti artist Daniel Wenn to adorn the wall beside a floating mirrored staircase embedded with silver glitter.

That staircase will lead to Weir’s salon space on the second floor, which is aimed at preserving the Le Louvre’s tradition of highly personalised service on a by-appointment basis.

And there will be a lift. “That’s what started this all, you know. I just couldn’t get my clientele to go upstairs.”

But the famous front salon – will remain the same. The trademark touches of ocelot, the gilded mirrors, the elegant sofas will all return. And, of course: “No clothes on show.”

A new decade, an all-new Le Louvre and a new generation of ‘Le Louvre girls’

Mirrored staircases and logo graffiti by artist Dan Wenn have given the old dame a futuristic lift, with the space divided into an upstairs private client salon for the old faithful and a ground floor retail boutique for the next generation Le Louvre girls. For the first time, Le Louvre has a walk-in boutique aimed at younger shoppers, with the salon upstairs.

“I want it to be for the friends of our young staff and the young people in Melbourne,” Weir says. “For the first time we will have clothes that you can actually see, not locked away in cupboards. It’s to show off all the things that we have and it’s just a more modern way of shopping. Plus we’ll have a lot of new designers coming in.”

Those labels downstairs will include RM by Roland Mouret, Celine, Acne jeans, Christopher Kane and Giles Deacon jewellery, which will be housed in a more contemporary interpretation of the Collins Street store’s gilt and ocelot pelts.

Like her mother when she opened Le Louvre, Weir has looked to Europe with the South Yarra salon, and bought many of the fittings there. But where her mother preferred gold and ocelot, the new Le Louvre shimmers with silver and glass, from the boutique’s sparkling floor and walls to the cascading art deco chandelier, mirrored staircase embedded with glitter, and banquette of metallic pressed crocodile skin.

Just don’t call it a shop. Weir, an avid collector of Aboriginal art, plans to hold art exhibitions and events there. “I can’t find it in myself to have a shop and every time it was looking like a shop I’d say, ‘No, we’re having no chrome, no shiny surfaces’,” she says. “Other shops (of international luxury brands) are full of shopfittings and they look the same worldwide. There’s no mystery or excitement – you know that what you see is what you get. I want people to come in and look around in wonder and think, gosh this is so different.”

The boutique’s ranges of Acne jeans and Christopher Kane T-shirts, along with labels such as Balmain, RM Roland Mouret, Celine, and Moncler, are aimed at fashion-conscious young professionals – a sign of the times, says Le Louvre’s head buyer, Amelia Coote. “People of my generation are not used to that formal way of shopping. Fashion’s changed as well – people used to have complete outfits, like a suit, but nowadays no one wears an outfit. That’s the fun part of fashion, choosing bits and pieces and being creative. And people don’t dress so seasonally.” Formal and bridal wear is only available upstairs in the salon, where clients are fitted for gowns by Lanvin, Yves Saint Laurent, Ann Demeulemeester, Elie Saab, Azzaro, Galliano and Marchesa for bar mitzvahs, weddings, milestone birthdays, christenings and the red carpet. “If someone is buying a beautiful dress and being really extravagant, and they want to reveal it at some big event, they don’t want to have seen it on a rack,” says Coote. “They can make an appointment and come in and have a glass of wine and be fussed over in a private salon.” From A nice little frock shop by Susannah Walker, The Age